Bewitching: His Secret Agenda

by Carla Neggers

  “Not sleeping well?”

  Her eyes, shining and so damned green, met his, and she smiled, knowing, he guessed, what he was thinking. “You flatter yourself, Win Harling.”

  “I’m not keeping you awake nights?”

  “Nope.”

  He laughed. “That’s two lies—or at best half truths—so far. Want to go for a third?”

  She scowled at him, sipping her tea, clearly savoring it, rather than gulping it down, as he was his, in an effort to finish the job.

  Leaning forward, he said, “Tell me you’re not glad to see me.”

  “Are you asking me?”

  “Yes, I’m asking you. Are you glad to see me?”

  A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “What’ll you do if you believe I’m lying?”

  “That would be three lies in a row. I don’t know. I guess I’d figure something out.”

  “Then the answer is yes. Yes, I’m glad to see you.” She set her mug upon one knee, everything about her challenging him. “Now it’s for you to decide if I’m lying or not.”

  He took one last swallow of the purple tea and set down his mug, then leaned forward again, so that his knee touched hers, and brushed one finger across her lower lip. It was warm and moist. Her eyes were wide with desire.

  “I think a part of you isn’t lying,” he said, “and a part is.”

  “Do you know which part is which?”

  He could hear the catch in her voice, the breathlessness. She had pulled off her sweatshirt; underneath it she wore a long-sleeved navy T-shirt. The fabric wasn’t particularly thin, but he could see the twin points of her nipples, whether still from the cold or in reaction to him, he couldn’t be sure. He made no attempt to disguise his interest.

  “I think I do,” he said, and this time he could hear the catch, the breathlessness in his own voice. He raised his eyes to hers. “Time for one part to listen to the other, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Should my mind listen to my body or my body listen to my mind?”

  “Decide, Hannah. Decide, because your purple tea hasn’t soothed me one little bit.”

  He skimmed her nipples with his fingertips, inhaling deeply, wanting her more than he’d ever wanted any woman. But he knew he had to hold back. Knew he couldn’t touch her again, because if he did, he would be lost. He would never get Hannah Marsh out of his system.

  Her breathing was rapid now, and he could see the pulse beating in her throat. But she didn’t draw closer.

  “It’s your decision, Hannah. It has to be.”

  “Why?”

  “You didn’t invite me here. I came. I thrust myself back into your life. It’s your decision if I stay.”

  She licked her lips, but pulled her lower lip under her top teeth. Didn’t move.

  “How long do I have?” she asked.

  He tried to smile. “Now, Hannah.” He knew how tortured he must sound, but couldn’t help it. “Decide now.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HANNAH JUMPED UP, spilling her tea. She raked her hands through her hair. Every millimeter of her wanted to fall to the floor with Win Harling and make love with him, until neither of them had the strength left to accuse the other of anything. Instead she said, “You need to meet Cousin Thackeray.”

  Win remained seated on the couch. She wasn’t deceived by his outward composure. His eyes were half-closed, studying her. His mouth was set in a grim, hard line. The muscles in his arms and legs were tensed. Everything about him was taut, coiled, ready for action.

  And she knew what kind of action.

  She wondered if his scrutiny would ever end. She watched the tea seep into her dhurrie carpet and wondered if the purple stain would forever be a visible reminder of her encounter with a real, live Harling. A warning of the perils of her own nature. A symbol of regret, of what might have been.

  She should have stuck to dead Harlings.

  Finally he slapped one hand on his knee and rose with a heavy sigh. “Okay, let’s go.”

  “You’re sure it’s okay?”

  “Hell, no. I’d rather carry you into your bedroom and make love to you until sunup, but—”

  “That’s not what I meant.” She felt heat spread through her. “Cousin Thackeray—are you sure you want to meet him? He doesn’t care for Harlings.”

  “Has he ever met one?”

  “He says he did decades ago, but he won’t give me a straight answer.”

  Win nodded thoughtfully, and Hannah grabbed her squall jacket, glad to have the added cover. She could still feel the physical effects of wanting this man she had absolutely no business wanting. Even his gaze sparked pangs of desire in her. But she had to maintain control. She couldn’t give in to her yearning...until she was sure she was doing the right thing.

  “Well,” he said, “let’s go see if he decides to run me off with a shotgun.”

  “He doesn’t own a shotgun. I’d watch out for a hot poker, though.”

  “A charming family, you Marshes.”

  They followed the narrow gravel path to the dirt road that connected Hannah’s cottage to the main driveway. The wind made the air feel more like winter. Cousin Thackeray’s few pitiful tulips seemed to be wishing they could close up again and come out when it was really spring. Walking beside her, Win didn’t appear to notice the cold. Maybe he even welcomed it.

  Thackeray’s truck was still outside, but he didn’t answer his door. Hannah pounded again. “Thackeray, it’s me, Hannah.”

  No answer.

  “He must have gone for a walk,” she guessed. “Or maybe one of his buddies from town picked him up for a game of chess, although he usually lets me know when he’s going out.”

  “He could be taking a nap.”

  “Are you kidding?” But she pushed open his back door, unlocked as always, and poked her head inside. “Thackeray?”

  “We can look around out here,” Win suggested, “or try again later. What have you told him about your trip to Boston?”

  “Everything.” She cleared her throat, feeling hot and achy with desire, and added quickly, “Except about you, of course.”

  He smiled. “Of course.”

  “It would only upset him.”

  “I understand.”

  She wondered if he did. “Does your uncle—”

  “He knows to stay out of my private life. Not that it stops him.”

  “Does he really think I broke into his apartment and stole Anne Harling’s diary?” But she didn’t wait for an answer, springing ahead of Win to reach the driveway again. She cut over the side yard, heading toward the rocks. “You know, we only have your uncle’s word for what happened.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning it’s possible he made up the whole thing.”

  “You mean he pulled apart his entire apartment himself?” Win said dubiously.

  Hannah knew she was on shaky ground; she could just imagine how she’d react if Win said something similar about Cousin Thackeray. “I’m not saying it’s likely, just possible. I know I didn’t do it.”

  He caught up with her. “What would be his motive?”

  She shrugged, proceeding with caution. “Nothing devious, for sure. Cousin Thackeray would probably pitch me onto the rocks for saying this, but I actually like your uncle. I wouldn’t want to believe he was up to anything truly underhanded.”

  “Such as?”

  Inhaling, she went ahead and said it. “Getting Marsh Point back into Harling hands.”

  She continued walking, but Win stopped, not speaking. Up ahead, she could see Thackeray among the low-lying blueberry bushes with his binoculars, looking out at two cormorants diving for food.

  “Thackeray!” she called, and waved.

  He lowered hi
s binoculars and turned, spotting her and waving back. She could see his grin.

  “I’ve got somebody for you to meet!”

  Behind her, Win said, “No.”

  She whipped around. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m not going to wait and see if I pass Thackeray Marsh’s inspection. I’m not going to let you let him decide for you whether or not we—you and I, Hannah, no one else—go forward. I won’t make it that easy for you.” His black eyes searched hers for long seconds, and she saw in them not only physical longing, but a longing that came from his heart, maybe even his soul. “You’re going to have to decide this one for yourself.”

  He about-faced and marched down the path toward her cottage.

  Hannah gulped, not knowing what to do.

  Cousin Thackeray was heading in her direction. Not fast—he never moved fast. Had she dragged Win out here to meet him, just so she could avoid making any decision about their relationship herself? What if Thackeray didn’t like Win?

  What if he did?

  She sighed. It shouldn’t matter how Thackeray felt. Win was right. “The bastard,” she muttered.

  But she didn’t chase down the path after him. Instead she trotted across the windy point, toward the old man to whom she owed her loyalty, if not her life.

  * * *

  “YOU’RE SULKING.”

  “I’m not sulking.”

  Thackeray squinted at her in the bright sunlight, but didn’t argue. He thrust his binoculars at her. “Look, a loon.”

  Hannah had no interest in his loon sighting and just pretended to focus the binoculars, while Thackeray gestured and gave instructions. “I see it,” she said dispiritedly.

  He hissed in disgust and yanked the binoculars away. “No, you didn’t. There’s no loon out there.”

  She pursed her lips. “That was a cheap trick.”

  “No matter.” He gave her a long look. “Do you want to tell me about the Jaguar with Massachusetts plates parked at your cottage and that man I saw with the distinctly Harling build?”

  Distinctly Harling build? What did Cousin Thackeray know? But she gave up before she even started. She was confused enough as it was.

  “It’s Win Harling,” she told him.

  “The younger J. Winthrop.”

  She nodded.

  “Why’s he here?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “They’re after Marsh Point, aren’t they, he and his uncle?”

  Hannah hesitated only a moment. “It’s possible. I have no proof, of course, but the uncle’s story about his apartment being ransacked and Anne Harling’s diary turning up missing strikes me as a bit fishy.”

  “Me, too. Think Win’s a party to it?”

  “It’s hard to say. He’s about as loyal to his uncle as I am to you.”

  Thackeray scowled and hung his binoculars around his neck. “What the devil’s loyalty got to do with anything? A Marsh thinks for himself—or herself. You don’t do what’s wrong out of some skewed sense of loyalty. You do what’s right for you.”

  But what if what’s right for me is falling in love with J. Winthrop Harling?

  “Hannah,” Thackeray said when she didn’t respond.

  She turned to him. His nose was red in the cold air, his ratty corduroy jacket was missing a button. He was like a grandfather to her, a father, an uncle. Most of all, he was a friend. “I won’t do anything that would make you hate me,” she said.

  “What in hell could make me hate you?” he scoffed.

  She looked toward her cottage.

  Then Thackeray Marsh surprised her with a hearty, warm laugh, one that reminded her he had led a long, full life. Still laughing, he headed through the blueberry bushes that were just beginning to get their foliage.

  “What’s so damned funny?”

  “You and that Win fellow. My God, wouldn’t that set three centuries of Marsh and Harling bones rattling?”

  “I don’t give a damn. We’re talking about my life here, you know.”

  He stopped and spun around so abruptly that for a moment she thought he’d lose his footing. But she had never seen him so steady. “That’s right,” he said intently, his laughter gone. “It’s your life.”

  With that, he pounded back to his house.

  When Hannah returned to her cottage, Win was staring out her picture window. She controlled a rush of desire at seeing his tall, lean body, at seeing him still there.

  “I thought you might have cut your losses,” she said.

  He looked around, the corners of his mouth twitching. “Sounds a bit drastic, don’t you think?”

  She refused to blush. “Witty, witty.”

  “I try.” But his humor didn’t reach his eyes, and he asked, “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  “Who decided?”

  “I did.”

  He nodded. “Good.”

  “I owe Cousin Thackeray a lot, and I’d never deliberately hurt or disappoint him, but not making up my own mind about things...” She paused, searching for the right words, the courage to be honest. “Not making up my own mind about you—that isn’t what he wants from me, even if it were something I could ever give.”

  Win was silent.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “And you believe me?”

  He smiled, the humor now reaching his eyes. “This time.”

  “Win Harling...”

  “Shall we go talk to the old buzzard?”

  She laughed. “I believe he used the same expression to describe your uncle. I thought we...” She felt blood rush to her face. “Never mind. I guess it’s your turn to torture me.”

  “Hannah, Hannah,” he said in a low, deliberately sexy voice, “you haven’t seen anything yet.”

  * * *

  THACKERAY MARSH PROVED as irascible as Win had anticipated. He and Hannah joined the old man at his drafty house for lemon meringue pie that must have been around for days and coffee that tasted as if it had been poisoned. Win later learned that Hannah’s cousin had reheated it from his pot that morning. A waste-not, want-not family. Hannah, he noticed, drank every drop.

  “So,” Thackeray said, “how’s that old goat of an uncle of yours?”

  “He’s quite well, thank you.”

  Win glanced at Hannah but couldn’t will her to meet his eyes. She was sitting cross-legged on a threadbare braided rug in front of a roaring fire. Southern Maine’s evening temperature had plummeted; there was even talk of frost.

  “We met decades ago. He was a frosty old bastard even then. Heard a Marsh had dared set foot in Boston and hunted me down, warned me one day the Harlings would get Marsh Point back. He called it Harling Point, o’ course.” Thackeray fastened his intense gaze—his green eyes bore a disturbing resemblance to his young relative’s—on Win, who didn’t flinch. “That why you’re here?”

  Win worded his reply carefully. “I’m not interested in pressing the Harling case for Marsh Point, no.”

  Thackeray grunted. “They don’t have a case.”

  “Then why worry?”

  “Who said I’m worried?”

  Definitely irascible. Hannah smiled, visibly amused, as she uncoiled her legs and rested on her arms. Win wished, not for the first time, that he hadn’t been so damned noble and had instead made love to her before offering to chitchat with her elderly cousin.

  Before heading out, she had insisted on taking a quick shower—he hoped she’d had to make it cold—and had twisted her hair into a long French braid that hung down her back. Win still didn’t know how he’d stopped himself carting her off to the bedroom there and then. Even now it amazed him.

  With her ha
ir pulled off her face, her eyes seemed even bigger, more luminous. She had changed into jeans that conformed to every shapely turn of thigh and calf and left him imagining how her legs would feel entwined with his. Her top left much more to the imagination. It was a huge sweatshirt she must have picked up in Vermont; it had a Holstein’s head on the front and its behind on the back, with Enjoy Our Dairy Air in black lettering. Apparently she collected T-shirts and sweatshirts. She had shown him one of the Beatles, circa 1967. It was another side of the scholarly Hannah Marsh, as was her Hannah of the Cincinnati Harlings. A complex woman.

  “Win came to Maine to make sure I hadn’t made off with Anne Harling’s diary,” she informed her elderly cousin, “which his uncle still insists I stole.”

  “He only wants to know the truth,” Win amended. “So do I.”

  Thackeray waved them both off. “I’ll bet you a day’s work Anne Harling didn’t keep a diary any more than I did.”

  Hannah shook her head. “It wouldn’t surprise me. Upper-class women of that era quite commonly kept diaries....”

  “She didn’t.”

  But Hannah didn’t give in, so Win sat back and observed while the two argued about the journal-keeping habits of late-nineteenth-century women. It was a spirited discussion, given, at least to Win, the dry nature of the topic. As far as he could tell, the two Marshes didn’t even disagree.

  “But back to Win’s Uncle Jonathan,” Hannah said, and Win’s interest perked up. He saw the flush of excitement in her cheeks and smiled, not just wanting her, but liking her. “He indicated Anne Harling was the one who pulled together the Harling Collection, his theory being that I stole her diary to look for clues as to the collection’s location.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Thackeray said.

  “Of course. The Harlings have had the diary—if it exists—for a hundred years, and certainly would have noticed any reference to a collection that could contain a valuable copy of the Declaration of Independence.”

  Win couldn’t let that one go unanswered. “Maybe they never read it,” he speculated. “Or maybe in your research you learned something that suggested to you a passage in the diary was really a disguised clue, something we wouldn’t have recognized all these years. Maybe,” he went on, ignoring Thackeray’s snort of disgust, “you weren’t looking for the diary itself, but stole it because it was the only thing of potential value in my uncle’s apartment.”